


Tenth Sense

by MajorEnglishEsquire



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Brothers, Bunker Feels, Family, M/M, Men of Letters Bunker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 02:59:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13801956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MajorEnglishEsquire/pseuds/MajorEnglishEsquire
Summary: Seeing is believing in this job.





	Tenth Sense

Sam is a contributor. Sam is half of his senses.

Dean's always had two sets of everything when it comes to navigating the world. Sam is his second set of eyes, his second nose, the second set of hands literally everyone wishes they had - confident, fast, dead-aim.

When Sam talks, Dean obviously listens. Sometimes he doesn't want to. Sometimes he doesn't let it _sink in_. But he does hear.

He's been hearing this shit about Cas for so long it's finally getting on his nerves.

It's been a particularly exhausting semi-annual shopping excursion and, fact is, neither of them would opt to go shopping for an entire day if they had any clothes left without bloodstains but even Dean's increasingly black wardrobe is showing clear signs of monster hunting. It was necessary.

What wasn't necessary was Sam's incessant nattering that he _wished Cas would hang out with them today_ and _you should pick out something nice for him, too, while you get your stuff, Dean_ and _he loves you, you should at least--_ whatever whatever whatever. Dean tuned out for a lot of it.

They settle in the car after the last strip mall and Dean cracks open the lid on his coffee and Sam is totaling their receipts to determine if any of the credit cards are about to hit the limit and get monitored for unusual activity. "Why doesn't Cas live with us, yet, anyway?"

Dean pauses. Rolls his eyes to the sky. Tosses his free hand and sighs.

"I mean, like, it's annoying enough that he always decides his personal missions mean he doesn't need to pick up the phone, but I also reserve the right to be miffed that he's totally kinda," Sam reels his hand, looking for the word, "unmoored. Like he can't anchor himself with you, like he's gotta be such a free spirt. Like, at some point you'd think he would clue in-"

"To. What." Dean snaps.

"Uh. Duh. To the pining. You set up a bedroom ages ago and he still hasn't clued in to the fact that you want him fucking living there! It's just... weird. I mean human stuff is a lot less of a mystery to him anymore. Why can't he-"

"Why can't _you shut up??_ "

"God," Sam shakes his head and sighs and goes back to his receipts. "Pining," he digs just one more time.

"Nobody's pining!"

Sam slaps his own knee and laughs and shakes his head again. "Every time you call him and he doesn't answer you either reach for a beer or you _physically_ shrink like four inches into your shoulders. You become an even shorter person. Signs of depression, signs of rejection. The only one you're deluding is yourself. It's far past the point where you'll convince me."

Dean tunes him out again. Starts the car one-handed and pulls out of the parking lot, starts driving home. By the time he's reaching to stuff his empty cup in one of the spare shopping bags - Sam helps him snag it and dump it without spilling on the seat - his brother has just one last thing to say. And Dean isn't sufficiently tuned out at the moment.

"Thanks," he mumbles.

"I've seen it," Sam says.

That's all he says. The last words that ring out in the car for the next fifty miles, even.

He's seen it.

\---

Seeing is believing in this job.

Sam couldn't possibly have said anything that would haunt him more.

They take people's adrenaline-pumped, inaccurate, first-hand accounts of impossible sights and turn them into usable information all the time.

But this is worse. Because Sam's had his eyes on it for a while. Evidently enough to be studying it. Studying their reactions, both Dean's and Cas's.

Sam said "I've seen it" with the same confidence he said "Seven o'clock" the other day and all Dean had to do was turn and fire.

Because Sam told him exactly where the threat was. Dean's second set of eyes is incredibly accurate and it's not like he wishes it wasn't.

He just wishes he didn't have to say that he's the one who's repeatedly told Cas that they're brothers -- a family, yes, but _brothers_.

The way Sam said it, Dean realizes he's seen those symptoms before, too. The pinch in features and the physical shrinking.

And the fact is, he's rejected, or rebuffed? Preemptively headed-off? Whatever. He's said this to Cas too many times for it to be mistaken.

 _Listen_ , he wants to say, _I'm holding on to my sanity by a thread as it is. Do you honestly think I've had time, over the past three decades in my bloody, gory life, to parse out anything other than what will make me weak and what will make me strong?_

The appearance of strength is everything, let's just face it.

A man who knows he wants to take a woman to bed, a man who knows he wants to take care of a woman and be somebody she relies on, a man who shoots the heads off things that threaten women or kills the things that go bump in the night in the memory of every woman who's ever been good to him, starting with his _dead mom_.

This is always just what he's known how to be. 

He doesn't look down on gay guys or whatever, but he's never had the luxury of wavering from what he's built his image on, okay? It's like the damn shopping trips. Would he like softer socks? Yes. Would he like dress shoes that are easier on his back when he has to run for it in his fed suit? Yes. Would he like to....

It feels blasphemous to admit it. But would he like to buy one of those hooky cup-holdery things for inside the car?

Yeah. Kinda. Just to use every once in a while. _Maybe_.

But he knows who he is and he knows what his image projects and it's safest to keep it that way.

He has never wanted to climb up inside that hornets' nest of issues and figure out what's really going on when him and Cas have these tense, drawn-out, hyper-focused moments. He's never wanted to sit with Cas and ask, "So you're wearing a man, but what does that really make you?" He has never-ever wanted to deal with the fact that he's been fucking chicks since he was fifteen and they were all as attractive to him at every point in time as Cas has been since the first time Dean noticed how fuck-off gorgeous his eyes are and maybe held the eye contact a little longer than necessary and... totally blamed it on him and told him there's this thing called "personal space."

This would all be easier to slide past and ignore if his fucking second set of senses hadn't chimed in and planted this idiot idea in his head.

Now his brain feels required to work the problem.

Dean digs a thumb at his head between his eyes. His wrist hurts from having to haul himself over two fucking fences last week and the insides of his knees are still bruised.

It would.... be pretty nice if Cas were here to do that thing where he casually taps him on the face and zaps all his aches away.

That just means he wants to use the bastard. That doesn't mean he's pining. That's the opposite of love - just using him like that.

But the more he refuses to focus on the moments that have felt like pining, the more he can hear Sam fucking _narrating them_ in his head. They get home, he makes dinner, he settles down with a beer or two while looking at the news of the weird. Something makes him laugh and turn to his left.

Nobody's there. He frowns. It had distinctly felt like someone was there. He was turning to-

He was turning to explain a joke to Cas and, yeah, Cas isn't here. Sam isn't even here to babble at.

He picks up his beer and sips it. It's quiet. There's some unwavering 1950s clock ticking away somewhere in the bunker's impenetrable machinery. They've wrecked the place and rearranged the rooms and rebuilt some of the walls and unhinged some of the doors because they couldn't break the locks and they've made the building their own. But it has its own purposes and personality and it lives on around him. Comfortable in a way and cold in other ways.

Dean snaps the laptop shut.

It's not crawling all over his consciousness. Sam's words truly aren't plaguing him.

What's awful is that the facts are just sitting inside his awareness. Like when the pieces of lore and the police reports and the pieces of shaky witness statements are sitting in front of them, deep into the night, in some motel, and they rearrange them until they have a plan of action.

Sam has already lent Dean his view of events. He's booksmart, that kid, and peoplewise, too.

Dean's not emotionally unaware. He just.

Blocks things.

It honestly keeps him functioning. That part of him that side-steps his own desires. There are plenty of others that he gives in to. He drinks when he wants, sleeps when he needs to, fucks when the opportunity presents.

Yeah. There's this room, across the hall from his own, that has some of the stuff Cas has left in the car and the bunker and occasionally in Dean's duffel or something. A few weapons. Little sachets of herbs. Talismans and trinkets and even nice postcards that he wouldn't stop looking at, so Sam bought them for him. Books he references that Sam can't read or doesn't have a use for.

That's Cas's room and Cas is a--

He's family. Dean's said it enough. Dean wants him here.

Eating his words is the hard part.

He's put enough distance between Cas and himself that it's probably clear to Castiel that he's a part of the team, but sometimes arm's-length is where Dean wants to hold him.

That's not something he's just shoved in Cas's direction. He's done that to Sam, too, honestly. He asks Sam to talk - to speak to him before he boils over, but he gets the impression that Sam doesn't often trust him with that.

Shit's unfair. He _asks_ , okay? He wants to be-

He's _trying_ to be a functional family member, here. Maybe he's a little rough. A little hard to deal with. And maybe that's also why Cas should keep his stuff in his pockets and his car and stay on the road. Not come too close. Maybe Sam's the only one hardened enough to handle Dean at his most personal.

Maybe he's been right to stay back.

He isn't even sure he could handle it if.

If Cas, like, wanted to. You know. Be closer.

Dean might fuck that up. It would be a lot easier to destroy his relationship with Cas if they were always closer.

In the end, he just maybe doesn't trust himself to make it closer and more comfortable as much as he trusts himself to break things by handling them more often.

Sam said it - he wants Cas around. Wants them to be a unit, together, more often. But when people get more exposed to Dean, he feels like they have time to find more reasons to dislike him.

He collects his empties and thinks about exposing himself that way. It's so easy to get someone to like him for the night. To take 'em back to the car or the motel room or their apartment and blow their mind and. Shit. He's even kept them happy through breakfast, which ought to be an Olympic sport - orgasms and really excellent breakfast burritos. Warm goodbyes, exchanging numbers. The look in a woman's eyes when she's hoping to see him again.

When they text, two, three days later, he usually blocks the number. Same with the calls. And it's not like he hasn't met women he wouldn't mind seeing again.

Jesus. He'd like to see Cas every day. Safe and whole. See him and know he's alive and still curious and still hilarious and occasionally happy.

He finishes up at the sink. Turns off the lights in the kitchen. Heads down the hall to his room. Pulls his phone from his pocket and wonders if it would really blow Sam's mind to-

It wouldn't.

And he hates being predictable. And sometimes he hates listening to reason.

Whatever. He taps around to call Cas. There's no answer.

Right.

A case for another day, then.

He thinks of China cabinets, suddenly. He's seen them in nice suburban homes. They hold plates and dishes and whatever. They exist only to show off stuff that you don't actually use. A fucking status symbol built from glass, porcelain, silver. They hold the things you love without letting you destroy them through _use_.

Oh, god. Here goes. He lays down and gropes for the phone again. Calls again.

"Dean? I apologize, I was-"

"No use in you being eight hundred miles away if you want to be here."

Cas is silent for a moment. "Here?"

"I just want you to know that if you want to be here, we could use you. Always."

"Dean," he draws out his name a little. There's a smile in it, Dean can tell. A warm, goofy grin. "Sam called yesterday. He said I have a bedroom?"

"He's a meddling shit but he's half of my sense of self-preservation," Dean sighs. "Half of my- he keeps talking about what I should know about myself. It's driving me nuts."

Cas sighs. "As much as I don't approve of you putting words in each other's mouths - I mean I tend to get confused? I still think sometimes he's willing to tell me things I should know when you would rather just. Leave it."

"Yeah. That. That makes sense."

"I'm not eight hundred miles away, I'm something like two hundred. Are you going to sleep?"

"I was going to, but then I had."

"A human emotion."

"You gonna mock me or you gonna tell me I did a good job constructively working through my feelings?"

"Technically you haven't yet. Would you rather tell me what you actually mean over the phone or while I'm in the room with you?"

Fuck it. He doesn't want to love his family through a glass case. It means more to him when they're bleeding next to him. Nicked ceramic and scarred stainless steel. No fine China or polished silver in this family. Steak knives. "I'm not tuckin' you in to bed every night, I just wanna make sure you eat your damn breakfast."

"Well." Cas takes a moment. "Your coffee is my favorite." He pauses again. "You're my favorite. I stopped caring that I'm not supposed to have those."

Dean smiles. "I'm your favorite."

There's still a grin in his voice. "You are. As long as you don't mind-"

"Specifically telling you right now that I don't mind."

"What did Sam say?"

Dean rolls his eyes. "That I'm pining for you."

"You are," he's confident. "I like when you're happy to have me back."

He takes a deep breath and admits, "That's not the only time I'm happy to have you."

They're quiet for a bit.

"Why don't you sleep? I can be there soon. I can come make you uncomfortable up close."

Dean laughs. It really will be uncomfortable. But. He can try. Nothing more fun than proving Sam wrong.

Except, you know, manning up and settling something himself.

"Looking forward to it."

«»

Cas is in his kitchen in the morning. The lights are on and Sam is nowhere around. Castiel is in the kitchen.

Dean stops in the doorway. Watches him nod. Get up. Move to the coffeemaker.

"Gonna help with breakfast?"

"Gonna show me my room?"

So he helps set the machine and they go down the hall.

He turns on the light and motions for Cas to step in.

After he does, he takes a slow look around, circling once. "I'm going to mention something."

"Okay?" Dean nods.

"I'm fine with our relationship remaining platonic. It's what makes you comfortable."

True. True.

Then Cas shrugs out of his jacket and hangs it up.

And Dean steps in and shuts the door. He could just. You know. Figure this out once and for all.

Cas stands there. It isn't where Dean wants him.

New clue: he wants him exactly... over here. Backs of his knees pressed to the edge of the mattress.

New clue: skidding his hands up Cas's arms and to his shoulders, he doesn't feel like stopping when he gets there. He feels like palming his neck.

New clue: Castiel smells comfortable this close. Windblown like he drove slow through the wheat fields to get here. Maybe the mountains.

Dean has recognized him in the dark, before, by this smell alone. The heavenly charge, like lightning, toned down in recent years. It has more strength to it when they're crouched and waiting. Or back-to-back, defending.

Yes, actually.

He solved it. He maybe didn't do it alone, but he got to the answer.

Steps close and kisses Castiel's closed mouth. His lips part when Dean hangs back. And that only makes him want to take a deep taste.

Alright. Okay. Hard part first.

"All that shit I said before?"

"Want me to forget it?"

"Thanks. That would help."

Cas shrugs like no problem.

Not so tough after all.

His fingers sweep into Cas's hair. Dean kinda wants to hold him. Over and over again. Make sure he's unbruised after a fight. Make sure he starts looking for reasons to come home.

That's kinda the place that Dean's at. It would be nice to have company here.

"Hm." Cas considers him and yanks him in and smiles against his mouth and takes his own kiss.

Worth it. He shouldn't have tortured the issue so damn long. Wrap this one up and go home.

Which, at the moment, is close.

Nice to get an easy win every now and again.


End file.
